How does a particle accelerator work and why is it so useful?
Do you know that most of us have a small particle accelerator at home and use it almost every day? For research, we use huge, powerful particle accelerators to study tiny things, which would be invisible otherwise. Quite generally spoken, particle accelerators produce high-energy high-speed beams of extremely small particles. These particles can be subatomic particles (electrons, protons), their anti-particles (every particle has a corresponding antiparticle), or charged atoms (ions). They carry an electric charge which is very important for the way the particles are accelerated: If one places a charged particle in an electric field, it feels a force from the electric field and is accelerated. To illustrate this, let’s do a simple experiment: Take a plastic comb and rub it against wool to create an electric field around the comb. Then immediately place the comb about half an inch above some very small paper crumbs (our “particles”). With some luck you will see that the “particles” get
